May 21st – I have been using two really good apps to book local tours or transfers, Klook and GetYourGuide. Apparently 12Go is also popular but it seems to focus more on transportation tickets than tours. All the tours are available privately, but at a higher cost, and obviously alone, so I look for “joiner” tours for the cost and opportunity to socialize.
It seems like sometimes there are more joiner tours on one app than the other, so it’s good to check both. As I mentioned, the traffic here can be a real obstacle to moving around and many of the sites are up in the hills above the city. Luckily I managed to find a van tour for today and was picked up at my hotel at 8am.
We spent about 30 minutes at most of the stops, which was enough other than the Basilica del Santo Nino where I could have spent more time. It also became clear early on that most of the spots were largely focused on Instagram moments rather than any actual historical or cultural significance. The most obvious was the 10,000 roses site in Cordova, which was literally a bunch of plastic roses stuck into a stretch of barren land, a coffee shop to provide a shaded area and a few photo op facades for selfies. Apparently each rose is luminated at night, but at 3pm, it was incredible hot and the point of the one hour drive to get there was lost on me.
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